iPhone 15 Pro will feature a new Sony camera sensor with double the performance of the 14 Pro

For a very long time, Apple has offered minor upgrades to the cameras on the iPhone from year to year. The 12-megapixel resolution and small sensor sizes have only started to be surpassed in the last few years, and now that the company’s engineers seem to have caught on to the “taste” of higher-performance cameras, they seem to be planning on it. There are already rumours of a major new upgrade for the iPhone 15 generation, which will get a new advanced Sony sensor.

The next flagship iPhone will offer a much more powerful photo sensor

According to Nikkei, Apple will again turn to Sony for access to a new smartphone sensor for its main camera. It could offer a major upgrade and over the excellent 48-megapixel sensor used on the iPhone 14 Pro models in 2022.

According to current information, Sony’s new sensor would promise improvements especially in the amount of light captured, but also in color saturation. Thus, photos on the iPhone 15 (most likely Pro), would see double the amount of light captured per frame, suggesting improved low-light performance, but also shorter exposure times. Then colour accuracy would be greatly improved, and dynamic range would be much better. So you could take a portrait even in bright light from behind the subject without losing detail.

Sony apparently achieved this performance by adopting a layered architecture, which puts certain components such as photodiodes and transistors on a different layer from the standard one.

Sony is currently the largest supplier of photo sensors, with 44% of the global total, but companies such as Samsung and Omdia have in recent years begun to capture significant percentages of the market. But the Japanese company hopes to reach 60% of the market before fiscal 2025.